James Tansey

James Tansey

CEO

James is the CEO and co-founder of Offsetters. He is also an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business and is the Executive Director of ISIS, a Research Centre at the Sauder School of Business dedicated to social innovation and sustainability. He has taught in MBA, EMBA, Executive Education, MSc and Undergraduate programs in the UK and Canada.

Following the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, James was selected as one of four international advisers working with the United Nations Environment Programme on the environmental strategy for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

James has worked as an advisor and contributor to the World Economic Forum, the UK National Audit Office, Oxford Analytica, Cisco, ISIS Innovation (Oxford), Environment Canada and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

Research by James covers a number of areas, including the social impacts and acceptability of new technologies such as stem cells and biobanks. He has written extensively on the role of public consultation in the governance of industrial societies, industrial ecology, scenario methods and climate change. More recently, his research has focused on emerging international markets for carbon exchange, social determinants of health in developed countries and the governance of biotechnology and genomics in Canada.

James received his PhD from the University of East Anglia in 1999. After a number of years in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UBC, he returned to the UK as a lecturer in Science and Technology Studies at the Said Business School in Oxford, where he was also deputy director of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization. He returned to UBC in 2006 where he joined the Sauder School of Business.

In 2010, James was recognized as a Top 40 Under 40 by Business in Vancouver and was a Pacific finalist in the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year® 2010 Awards.